> Even state and especially UC have “invested” significantly in infrastructure improvements paid for with loans backed by expectations of tuition income, which has had an absurd effect on growing tuition far outside of inflation.

What timeframe are you looking at?

Back in 2011, registration fees at UC Berkeley were $7,230 per semester, with $813 allotted to health insurance (which could be waived if you provided proof of existing insurance from your family), so $6,417 ignoring health insurance. Meanwhile, last year, registration fees were an eye-popping $9,847 for new students, but cost of health insurance grew much faster to $1,929 ($7,918 ignoring health insurance). This is about a 23% increase, compared to CPI-measured inflation of about 35% between Sep 2011 and Sep 2023.

(The next biggest driver of the overall increase was the campus fee, which went from $253 to $820.)

Or, if you look at just tuition alone, that went from $5610 to $6261, or just barely above 10%.

https://registrar.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fe...

https://registrar.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/fee_schedu...

If you look further back, in 1999, tuition was a mere $1543, but I posit that tuition at UCs has actually been fairly stable over the past decade.